Are you a software developer who wants to play a big part in advancing leading-edge patient care, medical research, and education? The Galter Health Sciences Library (GHSL) at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in downtown Chicago is looking for a technically versatile, curious, and cooperative software developer to join our Digital Systems group. You will envision, create, and sustain infrastructure, applications, and services for our digital services and repository. You will also have the opportunity to work on community-driven open source projects. 

The way we work represents the best of both academia and startup culture. You will be part of a leading research university and medical school while working on small, nimble teams using state of the art technologies and methodologies. We support continuing education, career development, as well as quality of life and flexibility. 

In this role, you will:

• Analyze. You’ll help gather requirements for projects, working with developers, librarians, and other team members to define them. 
• Design. Create workable models from requirements. 
• Build. You will partner with another developer to create complex and crucial parts to our systems. You will focus on performance and reliability. 
• Maintain/improve. Create and maintain code documentation, identify/resolve system performance issues and make improvements..
• Collaborate. Work with developers and the library team to plan, scope, build, deploy, and maintain our tools and resources. 
• Code responsibly. You will minimize tech debt, test and monitor everything, advocate for change or investment as needed. Review other team member’s code.
• Work on open-source projects as well as proprietary vendor-supplied systems.
• Learn, have fun. Be part of a small team within a large, thriving academic community.  

Your experience/skills: 

• 2+ years experience designing, coding, testing, and debugging software. 
• Intellectual curiosity, self-motivation, compassion, creativity. You are not afraid to experiment. You are kind. 
• User-focus. You care about the experience of those using our websites and resources as well as those creating the content driving them. 
• Polyglot programming skills. We work primarily with Ruby (Rails), Python, JavaScript, Bash Shell scripting. Our OS of choice is Linux. We use Shibboleth for single sign-on. We use Git for source control. Jenkins for CI. 
• System administration experience. You are comfortable in UNIX/Linux command line environments. 
• Commitment to engineering best practices. You write quality code, and don’t skip testing,  peer code reviews, or collaboration. 
• Communication. You are a good listener. You understand the privilege of being able to speak through your code and enjoy helping your colleagues understand the fine points of your work as much as you enjoy translating their ideas into technical solutions. 
• A degree in Computer Science/Computer Engineering (or commensurate experience).

Great to have:

• Experience with the open source community.
• Experience with cloud computing environments.
• Experience developing digital library and information management applications.
• Experience with digital library metadata standards and encoding schema (such as MODS, Dublin Core, METS, EAD, OAI-PMH)

If you are excited about this role, but you’re worried that you might not have enough experience, or exactly the right skills, please contact us anyway.